Movie Review – “Grimm”

Since subscribing to Netflix I’ve mostly been watching things streamingly. Getting a DVD in the mail and sending it back seems very 2007, somehow. I wasn’t sure if I would ever use the mail-order DVD service at all. But they have a decent selection of foreign-language films, and as I was watching one of them I realized there was an option to turn the subtitles completely off – and hey that’s cool. If I can do that, I can practice my Dutch. (Last time I tried to watch Dutch movies it was with the movie “Karakter” on VHS, and you can’t turn the subtitles off. It’s so distracting, at one point I taped paper over the bottom of the screen.) For years I haven’t been able to listen to anyone speak Dutch except on internet radio, and I don’t want to lose all my spoken language skills, so I started ordering Dutch language movies. But here’s the thing. Dutch movies come in only three varieties, as far as I can tell.

1. Movies about The War in Dutch or in English (if you have to ask which war, you’ve never seen a Dutch movie. ) – these movies can be good or bad, it’s a mixed bag.
2. Movies made by Dutch people,  not about the war, filmed in the English language – these movies can be good or bad, it’s a mixed bag.
3. Movies not about the war, filmed in the Dutch language – these movies care almost invariably bad. The movies that cannot get funding to be made in English are apparently never supposed to be made at all. And I am not saying that I LIKE it that way, I am only saying what I have observed to date.

So anyway, I know by renting a movie in Dutch I am taking a chance that it’s going to blow. However, it’s nice to practice my skills, as I said, and I can always just have in on in the background while I do other things. Even with that low standard, “Grimm” is going to earn a menstrual cup rating from me. Here’s the official synopsis:

Dutch director Alex van Warmerdam defies tradition in this absurdist, darkly comic retelling of the classic “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale. Brother and sister Jacob and Marie (Jacob Derwig and Halina Reijn) are abandoned by their family in the forest, with no other guidance than a note advising them to travel to Spain to visit their wealthy uncle. Embarking on a surreal odyssey, the siblings find their fortunes taking a number of unusual turns.

Now, you can’t tell it from that very small cover art there, but those are two grown-ass people on the cover. A Hansel and Gretel rehash with grown-ass people at the center makes no sense. Sure, they’re left alone in the woods by their father. But they’re not retarded – why don’t they go do something for themselves? Sitting on the ground and crying as an adult is very tempting, I agree, but it’s not really a workable life plan. So they’re promptly taken hostage by a farmer and his wife, and the man is sexually molested at gunpoint, while the woman is locked in a shed or something.  (Of course, it’s only molestation b/c the farmer’s wife is meant to be perceived as unattractive. If she’d been “hot” it would have been a fantasy seduction scene. Don’t even get me started there, though.) They escape by knocking the fat farmer and his fat wife through a cement wall (Ha ha! Nothing funnier than fat people falling down! ) and then promptly turn to a life of crime/prostitution.  They kill their first john, find a gun, and take off for Spain on a motor scooter. Once there they do more crimes, then get taken in by some Spanish guy who marries the girl while the guy mopes around being all incestuously love-lorn. Then we get all urban legend, as the guy is knocked out and his kidney snatched for the dying sister of his sister’s new husband. Confused yet? They make their magical escape, then hide out in a Spanish ghost town, disinfecting his wound with out-of-date eggnog, and then riding a donkey and practicing archery until the evil bad husband comes to “claim his wife” and they kill and bury him in the middle of the ghost town. After which point the girl says “I want to go home.” and they head off for home on the motor scooter. Begging the question, if they had a home to go to – why did they travel to Spain in the first place?

Ugh. It was a hot nonsensical mess. It MIGHT have been more interesting if the actors were children. You can see children making these choices, and forgiving them, or at least having empathy. But with grown people playing the parts you can’t feel anything but disgust for their idiocy.  Anyway, it blew.

But it was still nice to listen to Dutch being spoken. Let’s hope the next movie will be a smidge better though.